My Years With Proust - Day 724

   I saw Gilberte coming across the room towards me.  For me the marriage of Saint-Loup and the thoughts which filled my mind at that date - and which were still there, unchanged, this very morning - might have belonged to yesterday, so that I was astonished to see at her side a girl of about sixteen, whose tall figure was a measure of that distance which I had been reluctant to see.  Time, colourless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialised itself in this girl, moulding her into a masterpiece, while correspondingly, on me, alas! it had merely done its work.  And now Mlle de Saint-Loup was standing in front of me.  She had deep-set piercing eyes, and a charming nose thrust slightly forward in the form of a beak and curved, perhaps not in the least like that of Swann but like Saint-Loup's.  The soul of that particular Guermantes had fluttered away, but his charming head, as of a bird in flight, with its piercing eyes, had settled momentarily upon the shoulders of Mlle de Saint-Loup and the sight of it there aroused a train of memories and dreams in those who had known her father.  I was struck too by the way in which her nose, imitating in this the model of her mother's nose and her grandmother's, was cut off by just that absolutely horizontal line at its base, that same brilliant if slightly tardy stroke of design - a feature so individual that with its help, even without seeing anything else of a head, one could have recognised it out of thousands - and it seemed to me wonderful that at the critical moment nature should have returned, like a great and original sculptor, to give to the granddaughter, as she had given to her mother and her grandmother, that significant and decisive touch of the chisel.  I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes , full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1087-1088

Marcel finally meets the daughter of Robert and Gilberte.  She is sixteen, which among other things, suddenly gives the reader a sense of the years Marcel lost to his poor health. Clearly, Marcel is happy to meet her and it brings him both happy and elegiac memories of her parents, but, as youth as a tendency to do, it reminded him, painfully, of its diminishing place in his own life: "Time, colourless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialised itself in this girl, moulding her into a masterpiece, while correspondingly, on me, alas! it had merely done its work."  He saw in her his own lost youth, but it also reminded him of his youth. "I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes , full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth." Rereading this passage reminds me of my recent trip to Zanzibar, for a fairly odd reason.  One of my students grew very sick and my colleague Steve and I did our best to look after her until we could get the doctors and the insurance company on the same page and she and I were evacuated to Nairobi for better care.  Until that moment we spent several days squirreled away in room 32 at the Karibu Inn.  During those stressful days I fretted over her frailty, but also marveled at her strength, and it was impossible to somehow not see the whole thing as some great metaphor for the victory of youth over age, and whereas her world would very soon expand exponentially while mine would continue to close in on me.  I also thought that I would happily never leave that room again if I could just get her back to her mother safe and sound. On the day that we were due to fly out to Nairobi I awoke to a text telling me that my dear friend Gary Beatrice had died.  I allowed myself a brief but intense crying jag, but then had to pull it together to finalize plans and get her on the plane.  Luckily, and happily, she is now doing much, much better and will be coming home very soon.

Here is the view out of my temporary prison at the Karibu Inn, looking out over the rusted tin roofs. You can just make out the beautiful Indian Ocean, which was my only glimpse of it on this trip.